The Olivia Tremor Control

Dusk at Cubist Castle [Flydaddy, 1996]

Black Foliage: Animation Music [Flydaddy, 1999] B-

Consumer Guide Reviews:

Dusk at Cubist Castle [Flydaddy, 1996]

Black Foliage: Animation Music [Flydaddy, 1999]
This division of the Elephant 6 consortium loves tunes, and its soundscaping has few equals in indiedom. When it mixes the two, the result is often kinda beautiful even though the lyrics are avowedly "not going to shed any new light on humanity," and even though the sonics tend toward the perverse-disembodied outtake snippets, mechanical malfunctions, and tape fuckups that their hip-hop counterparts would bury in beats or declare inimical to organic life. But as the album goes on (and on), the strategy becomes not noize-toon synthesis, but weird song as reward for unpleasant sound. At its most generous, this may be the music of the young Brian Wilson's dysfunctional dreams. But at its most pretentious it's his bad trip. And bad trips weren't the main reason the psychedelic worldview fell into disrepute. The main reason was that it was full of shit. B-